Master of Arts (by coursework & dissertation) — Political Communication postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The week before local elections, the print and copy shop where I work produced posters for four different parties on the same machine. One afternoon I laid three proofs side by side on the counter while they dried. One candidate's face filled almost the whole sheet. Another's poster was mostly a list of streets where potholes had been fixed. A third carried only a slogan and a logo. All three were trying to win the same few thousand votes, yet each assumed something different about what would persuade a passer-by. That is the question I want to study: how political actors decide what to say, through which channels, and how audiences actually receive it.

My undergraduate degree in Media and Politics gave me a foundation in both halves of that question. Modules on political theory and public policy sat alongside media analysis and research methods, and I found the overlap more interesting than either side alone. Reading about agenda-setting, beginning with McCombs and Shaw's study of the 1968 United States presidential election, showed me how media emphasis can shape which issues the public considers important. Robert Entman's account of framing then helped me see that the same event can be presented to suggest very different causes and remedies.

I used these ideas in my final-year research project. I collected public Facebook posts from six ward councillors over three months of scheduled power cuts and coded each post for how it explained the outages, who it held responsible and what it asked residents to do. Some councillors framed the cuts as a national failure beyond their control; others presented themselves as local problem-solvers chasing repair teams. Comment sections were often more revealing than the posts, since residents corrected timings, shared their own updates or accused councillors of avoiding blame. The project was small and I was careful not to claim more than six cases could support, but it taught me to build a coding scheme, test it on a sample, revise unclear categories and write up findings with their limitations stated plainly. It received a first-class mark, and my supervisor encouraged me to consider further study.

Outside university, my job has given me a practical view of political messaging. Candidates and community groups bring in leaflets, and I often help adjust layouts so text is readable at a distance or fits a budget for black-and-white copies. I have learnt how much ordinary constraints, such as cost, deadlines and a printer's margins, shape what voters finally see. For the past year I have also taken minutes for my local residents' association. Summarising a two-hour meeting into a single page that neighbours will actually read has made me think hard about clarity, neutrality and what gets left out of an official record.

Not everything I do connects to politics. I play goal defence for a club netball team, and travelling to away matches across the city each Saturday has made me more aware of how different neighbourhoods experience the same public services.

At postgraduate level I want to develop stronger research methods, particularly in content analysis and audience research, and to read more widely in comparative political communication beyond the North American cases that dominate many introductory texts. For a dissertation, I would like to extend my undergraduate project by examining how local politicians use messaging platforms such as WhatsApp groups, where communication is less visible but often more trusted. I am organised, used to balancing paid work with study, and comfortable working carefully with messy, real-world material. I would bring that steadiness, along with genuine curiosity about how political messages travel, to a demanding taught and research programme.